ficlet (bsg): our empty rooms

[averita]

Title: Our Empty Rooms

Author: averita

Summary: They don’t talk much, these days, looking to books and the slide of skin to say what needs to be said.

A/N: You guys, I actually wrote fic! What is this? (400 words totally counts. It's been over a year and I'm very much in poetry mode at the moment.) This was written for adama_roslin's MOL, prompt "lonely". Spoilers

Comments

[akachankami]

(*o*) few crushing perfect utterly beautiful words!
thank you for writing this!

They dreamed of a world with wide skies and a quiet lake. He thinks he sees it now, Earth, in the still, dim light and the shadows on her skin. Her body is all flat expanses and sudden, subtle curves; her stomach clenches, plates shifting under a planet’s surface, and he tastes the ocean-salt along the curve of her cheek.
she made him believe in her and her dream of earth, and
i love that you compared her cancer to the nuclear destruction and her body to the wasteland that is earth. and i love even more that he sees it with his heart, like their dream was: beautiful and perfect and lovely ♥
the last sentences are so sad and true and perfect my heart aches!

[averita]

Thank you so much for such a sweet comment! I'm really glad you enjoyed.

[propernice]

Oh damn.

This is the first BSG fic I've read in...probably years. And it made me tear up, like I just...this was beautiful. I've always, ALWAYS wondered how she felt about Dee after Billy died, and I think this is really, really truthful and honest and beautiful.

Bill makes me ache a little.

Wonderful, wonderful job.

[averita]

In that case, I'm really flattered that you read it to begin with, and am so glad that you liked it. It means a lot. There are so many things in the show, especially in 4.5, that I would have loved to see explored further and I'm really happy that this rang true for you.

♥

[cynicalangel88]

This was truly lovely. I like the comparison you make about the people they have lost and how they assign blame. It’s very in character that Laura would blame herself for what happened to Dee, and equally in character that Bill would have never thought of blaming her. Well done. I’m loving all these MoL offerings; it’s like Christmas everyday around here.

[averita]

Thank you so much!

MOL is great - I haven't read all of the fics yet but I have several open in tabs just waiting for me, and I'm incredibly excited. It's nice to get back into the fandom.

[icedteainthebag]

I love this. It's very romantic/tragic to think of them as perpetually lonely, no matter how physically intimate they were at any moment in time. But I like that for them (maybe because I'm an angst hound)... that no matter how close they got to each other, there was a longing that didn't get met. They're not only separate here as they lie together; they're lonely for what was promised, for what they believed in and what they'll never have. What they have is this and you can tell for both of them that it isn't enough. They just deal with it in different ways. This is all expressed so well here.

You do a great job of having them engage each other using that complicated season 4.5 dynamic of his consumption by guilt and denial and her struggle to accept both the consequences of her faith in Earth and her long road toward death.

Thanks for writing. It was really lovely.

[averita]

Thank you!

I still go back and forth on 4.5. I think that everything you said here is exactly how I imagine them around ADFMS, which is largely why I was so uncomfortable with how that episode played out, and I'm really glad that you think it came through here. I'm ultimately torn between the angst-whore and the romantic in me, and ultimately think that they were able to come to some sort of reconciliation - I think that Laura, at least, was at peace and fully content at the end. It was very jarring, though, to go from The Hub (which I view as the pinnacle of their connectedness, so to speak) to the incredibly complicated dynamic that colored 4.5. It was really sad.

Anyway, thanks for the lovely comment!